On Narrative Strategies And Construction Of Female Subjectivity In Jhumpa Lahiri's Short Stories

Jhumpa Lahiri is a renowned contemporary Indian American writer.Her first collection of short stories,Interpreter of Maladies,is widely acclaimed once published,which makes her become the youngest winner of Pulitzer Prize for fiction ever.Her second collection of short stories,Unaccustomed Earth,became the top of the New York Times Best Seller list immediately after publication and won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award in 2008.As a female writer,in her works she pays much attention to the fate of women.In her two collections of short stories,she successfully shapes many vivid female images who have different social classes and living conditions,and depicts their constant exploration of their own value and persistent pursuit of their own happiness despite the pressure of patriarchal tradition.This thesis mainly analyzes how Lahiri realizes the construction of female subjectivity from the perspective of feminist narratology.The thesis comprises three parts,namely the introduction,the main part and the conclusion.The first part briefly introduces Jhumpa Lahiri' s life and writing career,reviews the history and current situation of researches on her works at home and abroad,and puts forward the central argument,research methods and significance of the thesis.In the main part,it firstly briefly introduces the origin,development and main theories of feminist narratology,and defines the female subjectivity mentioned in this thesis;then,it discusses how female subjectivity is constructed through narrative strategies in Lahiri's short stories from three aspects including the demonstration of female power,the expression of female self-consciousness and the release of female emotion.In her works,Lahiri successfully demonstrates female power.She comprehensively uses authorial voice,personal voice and collective voice to show females' seeking for life value,pursuit for love and spiritual growth,as well as females' collective power.Lahiri also realizes the expression of female self-consciousness through the switch in narrative perspectives.In some stories,Lahiri inherits the writing tradition of women authors and adopts female narrative perspective to highlight females' self-consciousness;while in other stories,Lahiri subverts the tradition and uses male narrative perspective to present female self-consciousness from the other side.In addition,by employing language skills including free indirect speech,paralipsis and unreliable narration,Lahiri better reveals females' inner feelings,manifests females' desire of self-reliance and revolt against patriarchy,which realizes the release of female emotion in her short stories.This thesis makes a conclusion that,by means of multiple feminist narrative strategies,Lahiri makes the spiritual world of female characters in her short stories more comprehensively and abundantly presented,thus female subjectivity has been better constructed.